When Is Easter?

Easter is not printed in a table, it is computed: the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the ecclesiastical spring equinox, which the church fixed at 21 March regardless of the real astronomy. That rule confines Easter Sunday to a 35-day window between 22 March and 25 April. Good Friday sits exactly two days before the Sunday and Easter Monday exactly one day after, so the whole block slides together: 5 April in 2026, an early 28 March in 2027, 16 April in 2028 — each taken from the official lists on our country pages.

Because a single computus serves the whole system, Easter has no meridian split of the kind that can move Lunar New Year: every country in our tables observes the same Sunday. What differs from place to place is not when the festival is, but which days around it a government actually closes — and that is the comparison the rest of this page makes.

What looks like one holiday is really five habits. Friday and Monday, with the weekend in between: Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa — whose law calls the Monday Family Day. That seven-country core is what a “four-day Easter weekend” means, and in Asia Hong Kong runs the same pattern with an extra gazetted Easter Saturday between the two, while Macau keeps Friday and Holy Saturday. The Friday-only habit closes the country on the cross and sends everyone back to work on the Monday: Canada, India, Singapore, Spain and Brazil. The third habit keeps the Sunday itself: Italy gazettes Easter Sunday and Pasquetta, the Monday after; Indonesia pairs Friday with the Sunday; and the Netherlands is the only calendar that closes all three days. France, Belgium and Ireland keep only the Monday. And the Philippines, alone, closes the whole Triduum — Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Black Saturday — without ever gazetting Easter Sunday.

The exceptions are the most useful rows. Ireland is the Catholic country where Good Friday is not a public holiday at all — banks shut, offices drift out, but the legal entitlement is only the Monday. Scotland drops Easter Monday while the rest of Britain keeps it. Spain fixes just one national day and lets the regions pad the Holy Week. And in India Easter Sunday appears on the restricted-holiday list, where each government employee elects individual leave — the office stays open, which is why it never appears in the day counts above.

Easter is the busiest long-weekend of the European and Oceanian year, and an early one — like 2027, when the Sunday falls on 28 March — pulls that peak into late March. Governments and schools close on the gazetted days; the Thursday before and the Tuesday after are the classic bridge days, where a single day of paid leave stretches a three- or four-day break to five. If you are coordinating offices across Frankfurt, London, Paris and Singapore, the binding constraint is the union of the closures: Germany and the UK lose Friday and Monday, France only the Monday, Singapore only the Friday — leaving Wednesday and Thursday as the only two days that every one of those offices is open.